HTML5: The Future of Online Video?

If you pay attention to online video, chances are you’ve heard of HTML5. It could be the next big technology that will change online video as we know it. Apple’s Steve Jobs famously stated several weeks ago, in his "Thoughts on Flash" letter, that Apple prefers HTML5 video to Adobe’s Flash technology. But what does HTML5 video mean to ecommerce sites? Is it something to embrace, or just another fad?

HTML5 Video: What Merchants Need to Know

What makes HTML5 video special is that it’s built in to the next version of HTML, dubbed “HTML5.” (See "What is HTML 5," published earlier at Practical eCommerce, for an overview.) Just as today’s HTML standard allows websites to add images to a web page through a simple  tag, HTML5 allows web sites to add videos to a website using a 

Copyright Trolls Threaten Your Ecommerce Business

Your website most likely has pictures on it. It might also have video as part of the design or to help in the sale of products. The use of these items is necessary to show your customers what the product looks like or the product’s functions. However, all too often the source of the pictures or video is not properly documented. This opens the door for “Copyright Trolls," a term that is used to describe a company or individual that buys up the copyrights to works and then engages in a campaign to try to profit from possible infringement through intimidating demand letters.

This term does not refer to someone who is making legitimate claims for use of a photo that may have been copied from a website illegally. The two typical types of Copyright Trolls are (1) those who try to scam people by intentionally putting their works out on the Internet as “free” and then later demand money for their use, and (2) those who purchase another company’s rights (usually a company that owns a large amount of copyrights in photos) and sends out blanket demand letters to all those using the photos to see if they can prove that they paid to use the photos or videos. Some schemes may be legal and some are done through misrepresentation.

What Do the Trolls Hope to Obtain?

Money, of course. A typical demand letter will ask for $1,500 to $2,500 because it will probably cost more than that to hire a lawyer to fight the claims. Owners of registered copyrights have very strong rights to recover damages and the Copyright Troll is betting that you did not carefully document where the photos or video came from and what your terms of use are for those items. Registered copyright owners' damages are not limited to just the actual damages that they can prove. The statute allows them to collect damages in the amount of $7,500 to $30,000 per work as the court may determine, even if you did not intend to infringe the owner’s rights. If the use is determined to be intentional, then the award of damages can be increased up to $50,000 per work. Also, the copyright owner is entitled to recover his or her attorney fees for suing you, which can add a significant amount to the damage award. These trolls use this statutory language to intimidate people into paying the lesser amount they demand.

How Do You Protect Your Website from Copyright Claims?

Document all photographs and video used on the website, including all photos used in Flash. All photos and video used in the design of your website need to be documented, even if only portions of a photo or video are used or if they have been altered during the development process. You should list all information about that photo or video, including where the photos came from, the photographer, the date you first used the photo or video, the terms of your use of the photo or video (your license agreement) and the date the license expires. You should print out and file all your license agreements in one location and make note of the photo or video to which each license agreement applies.

Summary

If you hire someone to take photos or video for you, you need to document the transfer of the rights to you and the terms of your use of such items. Under copyright law, the photographer owns the copyright interests unless those rights are transferred in writing. Therefore, if an independent contractor creates something for you, you must either obtain a license agreement to use it or obtain an assignment of the ownership rights in the photo or video. Each item should be carefully documented and filed so that if you receive a demand letter you are prepared to defend their claims.

Prebuilt Ecommerce Templates Save Money, Says AlgoZone's CEO

Ecommerce merchants frequently incur development fees to obtain specific features or appearances for their websites. But there are also prebuilt templates that can do this, at prices much less than custom-built solutions. One maker of these is AlgoZone. It offers hundreds of ready-made templates for, mainly, open source ecommerce platforms. Its CEO is Pavel Rojkov, and he recently discussed his template solutions with us.

Practical eCommerce: Your company, AlgoZone, produces ready-made templates for ecommerce websites. Tell us, what is a template?

Pavel Rojkov

Pavel Rojkov: "The ecommerce templates that our company provides are a quick and cost-efficient way to adapt a given shopping cart application with a professional storefront design. The template is a graphic site design integrated into the template system or the given ecommerce application. The template design and development process usually includes the creation of overall design, site navigation, and it also includes product presentation within the templates. Templates are often confused with the complete shopping cart solution. That is why the templates are designed and developed to be integrated and brought into the specific shopping cart or ecommerce platform like osCommerce, for example. The other important point to mention that with a template, clients generally save about 10 times of the cost because the templates that you buy from us cost around $150, and are available for immediate download. Compare that to the brand-new cost of up to $2,000 and weeks to develop."

PEC: How many ecommerce-related templates do you offer?

Rojkov: "We should have about 1,000 currently. But we constantly add new ones and discontinue old ones. We also sell templates exclusively, which means the client comes in and purchases a template, and we agree to remove it from the site. Our templates support about five shopping carts at the moment."

PEC: You mentioned osCommerce earlier. Give us an example of a an osCommerce template that you sell to ecommerce merchants.

Rojkov: "I could give you an example of a sportswear or sneaker business, for example. You would select the template. We have categorized designs based on the theme or the product line that you're using. So, you would pick a template for the sportswear or the sneaker business and you can pretty much focus on many things. One of them would be you look at the overall main page presentation. Some templates can have dynamic slide shows, where you can put your featured products or your key products.

"There's also the availability of refined search features, where you can search products by keyword or by attribute, such as color, size of the sneaker, and brand. So, that's pretty much a brief description of what it could be."

PEC: You mentioned five carts that you work with. What are those?

Rojkov: "With a large number of shopping cart solutions available nowadays, it's really difficult to provide for all of them. That's why we pre-selected five most popular and stable shopping carts. They are osCommerce, Zen Cart, OpenCart, Magento, and CRE Loaded."

PEC: Are those all open source platforms?

Rojkov: "All of them are free except CRE Loaded. It has both a free version and a paid one."

PEC: Let's say I am a merchant and I have a Magento cart. I sell sneakers or running shoes and I go to your site, Algozone.com. I see a template that I like, and I buy it and download it. I'm not a developer; I'm a merchant. What do I do after I download it?

Rojkov: "There are a number of ways to go. We provide video instructions on how to install. With Magento, we developed a tool that allows you to install templates more efficiently. It comes along with the template. So, if you view the instructions in the video, it will give you the basics of how to open the archive that you download from our website and how to upload it to your site. After that, you can go to the admin of Magento and enable the template."

PEC: How many merchants use your templates?

Rojkov: "It's hard to say. We sell in excess of 3,000 templates a year, but we have a lot of custom requests, which are done separately."

PEC: Merchants can buy your templates and download them immediately. If they have questions, can they call your company?

Rojkov: "Yes. We have support for any questions related to the template purchased. We actually go beyond helping with the template. In a lot of cases, we also help with the cart itself. But can't really take the responsibility of the cart, but we do help clients with a lot of issues that they have, and we also help them with custom developing extensions."

PEC: Tell us a little bit about AlgoZone When did you launch the company?

Rojkov: "We started the business in 2003. When we started it, we only supported two shopping carts, which was Interchange and one more that is no longer available. We also supported osCommerce and, since then, we grew to all five carts that I mentioned. In addition to that, we developed quite a few modules to shopping carts.

"We also launched, about four years ago, our fraud screen service, which helps clients protect from fraudulent orders and warns them upfront. The reason we released the fraud service is because there were large numbers of fraud that were coming to our own site. We also released iPhone templates just a little under a year ago."

PEC: So, you do have iPhone templates?

Rojkov: "Yes. In fact, we are planning to develop templates for all mobile devices. So, that's something that will be coming in the future."

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